By firing veteran correspondent Scott Pelley, the leaders of CBS News have elevated toadying over truth-telling.
Former 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, cashiered for the thoughtcrime of questioning Bari Weiss’s news agenda
(John Paul Filo/CBS via Getty Images)
CBS News used to be a place where reporters won Emmys and got raises for telling the truth. This week, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley got fired for it. At a staff meeting, the 68-year-old, 37-year-veteran of the network called out his new boss, executive producer Nick Bilton. Pelley could not contain himself when Bilton said CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss “loves this institution. She loves 60 Minutes.”
Pelley interrupted with controlled fury. “She is murdering 60 Minutes,” he said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”
Pelley went on: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the Evening News have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”
To illustrate his point, Pelley listed the 60 Minutes staffers who had been fired on what is now known at their offices as Black Thursday. That day came in the aftermath of Weiss’s decision to stop the planned broadcast of a story on the brutal conditions at El Salvador’s Terrorism Containment Center (CECOT) where the United States sent Venezuelan migrants for detention after their apprehension by ICE. Weiss felt the story was not balanced, and sought to add a MAGA counterpoint to what 60 Minutes already felt was a balanced, finished piece. 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi publicly criticized Weiss’s decision and was fired.
“I have been a journalist for 25 years,” Bilton shot back. “I’ve sat across from incredibly powerful people like you have, and none of it intimidates me. OK? So you are not going to intimidate me in front of this group of people.” Bilton then proved exactly how not-at-all intimidated he was by bringing Pelley’s outburst to the attention of Bari Weiss. Weiss accused Pelley of creating an unsafe work environment and insisted that he apologize. As this happened internally—an audio recording of the meeting was leaked to media outlets the day of the confrontation. What began as a closed-door shouting match between a reporter and a senior executive—a far-from-unprecedented occurrence in the history of journalism—went public as national news. It raised the stakes considerably. Of course, Pelley refused to back down. He meant every word of it. With his unapologetic criticism now public, CBS fired him.
Nothing says you won’t be intimidated like firing someone for criticizing you. Pelley spent nearly four decades at CBS, reporting, sitting at the anchor desk, and making it to 60 Minutes as a worthy successor to Mike Wallace, Dan Rather, and colleagues like Lesley Stahl. Pelley’s firing comes less than a week after Steven Colbert’s last episode aired and the affable, unremarkable Byron Allen has taken his place with his apolitical, sponsor-friendly show Comics Unleashed. It also comes as reports went viral that CBS News was trying to woo right-wing bro podcaster Joe Rogan over to 60 Minutes, in an attempt to connect with his vast listenership. (CBS now denies this.) A Rogan-branded 60 Minutes would be the journalistic equivalent of Trump building a UFC octagon arena on the White House lawn. In damage control mode, Nick Bilton contacted senior correspondents Lesley Stahl, Jon Wertheim, and Bill Whitaker to reassure them of journalistic independence. Given the last 18 months of CBS acquiescing to Trump, we’ll see how long this lasts. Why is all this happening at once?
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Yes, Pelley brought a level of reporting excellence and a historical relationship with 60 Minutes’ audience that can’t be replaced—but in the Trump 2.0 era, those qualities are a hindrance, not a help. People like Pelley tend to feel they know what they’re talking about and question their bosses. Worse, other people listen to them—a definite bug, not a feature for the MAGA model of public discourse.
In CBS’s brave new world, loyalty comes first—namely, the kind Weiss shows to her employers and not to her news division. As Pelley railed about Weiss’s lack of credentials in New York, Republican senators cited the same issue as they balked at at the news of Trump’s appointment of a new director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte. Pulte, 38, has no intelligence experience—a first-order disqualification in the past that roughly equates to a Harvard PhD for the country’s MAGA leadership caste. His chief qualification for the job is a singular loyalty to Trump—the same quality we saw on display from the CBS suits who gave Simon and Alfonsi the boot for their exposé on CECOT abuses and then dismissed Pelley for talking back to senior executives. It means not only does Pulte not question; he doesn’t really have the capacity to question.
It’s hard to believe that Bilton and Weiss acted alone when they sent a senior reporter and CBS icon like Pelley packing. 60 Minutes is the most highly rated news show on television. It’s racked up 4 million YouTube subscribers. Pelley is a large factor in that success. As Dan Rather recently wrote, “Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News, is a bit player in this drama, executing decisions that are made far above her pay grade.”
It’s not hard to divine who the players “far above her pay grade” are; Rather is most likely referencing the owners of CBS, the Ellison family. Recently actor Mark Ruffalo, a vocal opponent and organizer against the Ellison’s mammoth buyout of Warner Bros. and a pro-Palestinian activist, came to a similar conclusion on the I’ve Had It podcast. “To quote one prominent agent whose name I won’t divulge here,” Ruffalo said, “these are some vindictive motherfuckers, the Ellisons.”
Ruffalo went on to talk about the bid from Paramount-CBS to acquire Warner Bros., a deal that has not yet been sealed. The buyout would give the Ellisons control of two movie studios, CBS and CNN, and a host of other cable channels. Ruffalo has organized a petition of artists to oppose the merger, citing the jobs to be sacrificed, the weakened leverage of unions before the Ellisons’ mega-conglomerate, the loss of financial backers for artists, and decreasing diversity of movies getting made.
As the Ellisons have parted ways with everyone from Taylor Sheridan to Anderson Cooper, it’s clear that stellar talents are easily expendable in pursuit of this megadeal. What Pelley was up against on the East Coast is what Ruffalo opposes from the West. Besides the huge hits about to be taken in the entertainment industry, Ruffalo also sees what he calls “the degradation of journalism through political pressure.” Of a recent 60 Minutes interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, where Netanyahu was given a choice of interviewers between Lesley Stahl and Major Garrett (Bibi chose Garrett), Ruffalo said, “He would have never been on 60 Minutes outside of this regime.… that’s another thing that people really understand, there’s a whole other part of this, which is the journalists are starting to sign on. We have journalists who are coming out against this.”
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Ruffalo, like Pelley, has clearly reached a breaking point. “I’m not doing this because I’m fearless,” he explained to the hosts of I’ve Had It. “I’m doing this because I know we have to. And I know that no matter what, if I don’t speak out, it’s the same outcome. I’m already on a list, I’m already not a friend of these people. And so, you’re either gonna fight or you’re gonna lay down.”
As the Ellisons court the administration’s approval of their deal, the craven loyalty Trump demands from his cabinet appointees continues to disfigure great cultural and media institutions of our time. If Trump can’t get his name on everything he wants, he’ll settle for the next best thing: leaving a greasy orange stain on everything he touches.
With the midterm elections now firmly upon us, the question is whether Democratic candidates will do more than merely occupy ballot lines as mild alternatives to the red-hot crisis that is Donald Trump.
As Trump spends over $1 billion a day on a globally destabilizing war on Iran and admits that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation,” millions across the country are struggling with the surging costs of essentials. Democrats must seize this moment and advance bold, small-“d” populist ideas—not settle for cynical caution that once again snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
The Nation elevates progressive ideas, movements, and elected officials achieving real change across the country into the national conversation. At the same time, our journalists are exposing how crypto and AI-funded super PACs are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to knock out candidates they oppose, reporting on the devastating impact of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, and sounding the alarm on attempts by red states to quickly redraw electoral maps, disenfranchising Southern Black voters.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Huevel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
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